Towards Automated Network Mitigation Analysis (extended)
This addresses the challenge of automating and theoretically grounding mitigation analysis for network security, which is currently more art than science, but the approach is incremental as it builds on existing concepts like Stackelberg games and simulated testing.
The paper tackles the problem of prioritizing network security countermeasures under budget constraints by proposing the first approach for comprehensive what-if analyses using simulated penetration testing, showing that Stackelberg planning can derive optimal mitigation strategies to minimize attacker success on networks of varying size and vulnerability.
Penetration testing is a well-established practical concept for the identification of potentially exploitable security weaknesses and an important component of a security audit. Providing a holistic security assessment for networks consisting of several hundreds hosts is hardly feasible though without some sort of mechanization. Mitigation, prioritizing counter-measures subject to a given budget, currently lacks a solid theoretical understanding and is hence more art than science. In this work, we propose the first approach for conducting comprehensive what-if analyses in order to reason about mitigation in a conceptually well-founded manner. To evaluate and compare mitigation strategies, we use simulated penetration testing, i.e., automated attack-finding, based on a network model to which a subset of a given set of mitigation actions, e.g., changes to the network topology, system updates, configuration changes etc. is applied. Using Stackelberg planning, we determine optimal combinations that minimize the maximal attacker success (similar to a Stackelberg game), and thus provide a well-founded basis for a holistic mitigation strategy. We show that these Stackelberg planning models can largely be derived from network scan, public vulnerability databases and manual inspection with various degrees of automation and detail, and we simulate mitigation analysis on networks of different size and vulnerability.